Larry Magid writes that we need to "remind ourselves and our children that this kind of behavior is not only wrong, but it's abnormal and weird. Plenty of research shows that people are influenced by "social norms," how they think others behave. If people know that their neighbors don't smoke, they're less likely to smoke. The same is true with bullying. In other words, most people are nice and they're the ones we need to emulate. It's time to tune out the loudmouth boors who demonstrate their own inadequacy by picking on others."

The calls began coming in Monday. A horrified guidance counselor, a teacher, and then a student lit up Boston's new antibullying tip line, telling officials about multiple Facebook pages that featured pictures of female high school students with derogatory and sexually explicit captions beneath them.

Students and city and school officials say they have found at least 15 Facebook pages over the last few days that use obscene or hateful language to target female students, as well as a handful of male students, school administrators, and teachers at schools in Boston and surrounding communities. Boston officials have been scrambling to have the pages removed and have been meeting to figure out how to address the apparent cyberbullying and find the culprits. But as the offending Facebook pages come down, new ones go up. School officials and police are struggling to identify the perpetrators, who have been using fake names when they register with Facebook to create the pages. Police say they could pursue criminal charges if they determine that perpetrators have violated victims' civil rights.

The district attorney at the time, George Skumanick Jr., said that students possessing “inappropriate images of minors” could be prosecuted for possession or distribution of child pornography, and sent letters to the parents of the students with the phones — and the parents of students who appeared in the photographs — threatening to prosecute any student who did not participate in an after-school “education program.”

In the first federal appeals court opinion dealing with "sexting" - the transmission of sexually explicit photographs by cellphone - a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled Wednesday that parents could block the prosecution of their children on child pornography charges for appearing in photographs found on some classmates' cellphones.

Parents who worry that their children watch too much television can take heart: a bigger concern may be children spending too much time online. For children ages 10 to 14 who use the Internet, the computer is a bigger draw than the TV set, according to a study recently released by DoubleClick Performics, a search marketing company. The study found that 83 percent of Internet users in that age bracket spent an hour or more online a day, but only 68 percent devoted that much time to television.

Students and parents at Windsor High School are outraged after a Wyoming police officer doing a presentation on Internet safety scrutinized individual students' MySpace pages, calling the students' pictures "slutty" and saying their sites invited sexual predators. The officer, John F. Gay III of the Cheyenne Police Department, picked out six or seven Windsor High School students' MySpace pages and began to criticize photos, comments and other content until one student left the room crying.

Almost a thousand incoming freshmen at ACU (Abilene Christian University) received an Apple iPhone 3G or iPod Touch Aug. 16 as part of their first day in college. The deployment marks the first time that a university has introduced the Apple mobile devices as learning tools on such a large scale.

Many young people keep quiet about online bullying for fear they will not be allowed to keep using computers, says a bullying expert. Dr Shaheen Shariff, who leads an international cyber-bullying project from McGill University in Montreal, said more than half of young people with internet access would encounter online bullying as a victim, a perpetrator or a bystander. But almost two thirds admitted they would not report it because they feared losing computer privileges. Most children thought there was nothing adults could do to help anyway, said Dr Shariff, who was in Queenstown this week to speak at a Netsafe online safety conference.

ead teachers are being advised to draw up new rules on mobile phone use amid a growing number of cases of what is now known as “cyber-bullying”. In many secondary schools, over 90% of bullying cases are through text messages or internet chatrooms. It is hoped that the rules about mobile phone use will protect children from abusive texts, stop phones going off in class and prevent mobiles being taken into exam halls.

Although the majority of kids who are harassed online aren’t physically bothered in person, the cyber-bully still takes a heavy emotional toll on his or her victims. Kids who are targeted online are more likely to get a detention or be suspended, skip school and experience emotional distress, the medical journal reports. Teenagers who receive rude or nasty comments via text messages are six times more likely to say they feel unsafe at school.

The problem is that bullying is still perceived by many educators and parents as a problem that involves physical contact. Most enforcement efforts focus on bullying in school classrooms, corridors and toilets. But given that 80% of adolescents use mobile phones or computers, “social interactions have increasingly moved from personal contact at school to virtual contact in the chatroom,'’ write Kirk R. Williams and Nancy G. Guerra, co-authors of one of the journal reports. “Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty.'’

Cyber-bullying tactics include humiliation, destructive messages, gossip, slander and other “virtual taunts” communicated through e-mail, instant messaging, chatrooms and blogs. The problem, of course, is what to do about it. While most schools do not allow pupils to use their mobiles in the school building, an outright ban is deemed unworkable. Advances in technology are throwing up new problems for teachers to deal with. Children use their phones to listen to music, tell the time or as a calculator.

Cyber-bullies sometimes disclose victims' personal data on websites or forums, or may even attempt to assume the identity of their victim for the purpose of publishing material in their name that defames them or exposes them to ridicule.

As more and more people have access to computers and mobile phones, a new risk to youngsters has begun to emerge. Electronic aggression, in the form of threatening text messages and the spread of online rumours on social networking sites, is a growing concern.

The annual Mobile Life report, commissioned by the Carphone Warehouse and the
London School of Economics, says that 11 per cent of children aged 11 to 18
have had sexually explicit conversations online, with 28 per cent admitting
they have accessed adult websites.

What is the best way to open a discussion with your children, on a complicated subject such as online safety? Can Mom and Dad get "it"? In this article, Norton's Internet Safety Advocate Marian Merritt introduces easy ways to help you start "The Talk", and keep the dialogue going with your family. Includes 5 questions you should ask and talking tips to guide you in the conversation.